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The Buffalo Brews Podcast. We are finishing the Cheers to American Beer series, this is the fourth part, and we have been having fun talking about, so far we've been in the realm of cream ales, we've been in wheat ales, we have been in amber ales, and we're going to tie a bow on this thing. So we've been all over the country as well.
We've gone from Canandaigua, New York, we've been to Kalamazoo, Michigan, we just came from Daria Beach, Dania Beach, Dania Beach, Florida, and now we're bringing it to the historic city of Charleston, South Carolina. Absolutely. Yeah.
Yeah, and I like that, you know, thank you, you did the recap, I feel like I'm always recapping and then it just sounds like, oh, Craig, you're saying the same thing over and over again. That's what I'm here for. That's what, you know, when you don't know if everyone's going to listen to all episodes, you know, you want to do a little bit of a recap, so thank you there.
Within those beer styles, we kind of glossed over other ones, so this is kind of what I do with my classes. Ooh, honorable mentions, I like it. Yeah, we, you know, we talked about lager and where that came from with the German immigrants, and then we, you know, when we're talking about American wheat beers, you know, we talk about golden and blonde ales from America.
Then when we got into amber ales, that's where you're in your pale ale category, and you know, we glossed on IPAs a little bit, but now we are going to step it up. We are kind of just going down the SRM scale or up the SRM scale in darkness. We are exploring how you go from the lightest Pilsner malts with just a touch of hops to balance it to readily available cream ales where, hey, give me something like a lager, but make it quick so you treat it like an ale, to something that, okay, now I got a little bit more caramel, or sorry, I'm skipping the good old wheat ale.
So then like something that transitioned. I just recapped it for you. I know, and I'm like, cool, I need another one.
You know, now you're going into something that has a still light flavor profile when it comes to the roast and the flavor of your malts, even more so with the wheat ale kind of being more bread dough flowery, and then that amber was a ton of caramel malts, right? So let me recap what I told about the last episode about malts. You know, you got your base malts, and that makes up probably, you know, 65, 75, up to 80, 90% of your grain bill, and your grain bill is just, hey, what grains are we going to grind up, crack down so that we can add warm water, hot water to, to make a mash to then drain out and create a wort so that we can ferment it and drink beer in hopefully two to three weeks. So those base malts are really the backbone of the beer, and whether you decide to use Pilsner malt, Pal malt, or you go like Vienna or Munich malt, that's really going to dictate your end product.
Then this is kind of where, you know, the specialty malts being your caramelized malts, then your roasted malts, that's where you're really honing in the style now. So you're going to use, and it wasn't until, you know, Danny Willer and his roasting drum that you realized, oh, that's a lot cheaper to just use a lot of just base malt, you know, a lot of pale ale malt, and then just add a little bit of chocolate or a little bit of roasted, you know, black patent malts, and that'll just kind of make the beer shift to where you want it to be. So we are now taking a step into the roasty, toasty, you know, from caramel to taking it a step up, a little bit of nuttiness, but now that nuttiness is definitely going to go into the chocolatey, roasty notes, not just the caramel and slightly nutty notes.
So kind of to recap a little bit, we actually, you know, never did a porter, we talked about porters with a shout for stouts, and I'll touch base a little bit on stouts as well, but we're in the category of, all right, you know, past amber ale, where do we get to? We're in the brown ale porter category and territory. So to me, I kind of look at, you know, once we pass amber ale, right, you've got light colored beers all the way up until you get to amber, because then you're kind of in the realm of the golden beers until you hit amber, and that's like the transition into the brown and black beers. So, you know, the base level to me is the brown ale, and then from the brown ale you've got a porter, from a porter you've got a stout, from a stout you've got an imperial stout.
And if we think about the brown ale as the base, that is going to be a lot of chocolate, a little bit of caramel vanilla, and some toasty notes, a little bit of nuttiness, and just, you know, some brown ales you will get this like nice roast character, but to me typically it's not super roasty. Should be a little bit more caramel, toasty, but the roast should be present, just not dominant, I guess I should say. So then you take it up another notch to the porter, and then you lose a little bit of that caramel, it's still there, but very, very light caramel notes, but you now have some nice like, you know, light coffee roast, and we've definitely bridged into, hey, this is a roasty beer, so still a little bit toasty, touch of caramel, definitely a lot of chocolate flavors, not necessarily actual chocolate, even though there's plenty of chocolate borders out of there, but chocolatey notes, and then that hint of roast, and then you get to a stout, and your stout is now coffee, okay? We are roasted to the point where there's a lot of bitterness, not just from hops, but from the roasted malt as well, now you're adding black patent malt, if it's, you know, a lot of stouts, the difference between porter and stout is you have just roasted barley versus, you know, malted barley, it could just be roasted, and that roasted flavor really just gives it that kind of almost burnt flavor that, you know, you get with like a Starbucks or a Tim Hortons coffee, and you're in the realm
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of, I'm in, you know, a dark roast coffee.
Then you take another step up, not just with ABV, but imperial stout, now you have like espresso, almost acrid bitterness, and I'm talking, you know, an American imperial stout, this whole series has been about American, like, traditional, and what has shaped the American beer culture, so the imperial stout is going to be more of your very just espresso-like, almost acrid, bitter coffee notes, with like the faintest touch of chocolate, but mainly just coffee, dark coffee at that, and you probably aren't going to get much caramel whatsoever. So that's kind of the, now we're in that category of beer. And before I dive deep into porter, you know, kind of, you know, that brown ale, you know, like I said, we are skipping over that, but that's kind of in between the amber and then the porters and stouts.
I think of porters as like the baby stout, because they were, it was a stout porter before it became a stout, so porters were kind of like the dark beer. And they used to be brewed using nothing but roasted malts, and then, like I said, you know, we changed, and it was more economical to use pale malts with a little bit of darker malts. People said it changed the flavor, but people were still drinking it.
Porter was, you know, in the 1700s, it kind of ruled the world from England. It really industrialized beer, because you had to make so much of it, you were shipping it everywhere, so the infrastructure around it had to grow. And then porter was being aged in barrels for a certain time, so it would kind of lose some of its young or mild flavors, they would say, and it would develop what's called a stale flavor, and stale would, and this is more English porters, and stale would be like a touch of sourness, and that kind of helped balance that roast bitterness.
But then, you know, things got reformulated with that roasting drum, and then Americans got a hold of it, and they have their dark beer now, and there's basically like two, but actually now three categories, so if you hear like a brown porter, that's more of an English style porter. Then if you hear of robust porter, that's like an American porter, and, you know, just like we did with most beers that we took over from one place to another, it would be adding the American hops, so it has a little bit more of an American flavor profile when it comes to the hops, and a little bit more bitterness than, you know, it would be a little bit more chocolatey, a little bit more caramel-y in England, but here it's robust, a little bit more robust, and it'll probably take on a little bit more of a coffee note, and, you know, chocolate and caramel being more of a back seat. And then there's actually a Baltic porter, and that was one I talked about, could use a lager yeast, but basically, you know, the Baltic Sea, the states around there, I think the, I think it's Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, they were getting a ton of it, and then they just started using their own ingredients, and it's colder around there, so they decided, you know, and they ended up using lager yeast, because that was more readily available, and the colder temperatures, it was better to brew with a lager yeast, and that kind of just spawned its own style, and I really like a Baltic porter, it's typically more like an imperial porter, it's higher ABV, the one we're drinking here from Edmunds Ost, it's called Leather Jacket, it is described as an American porter, and it is a 6.5 percenter, and the American porter, I always suggest to people that say they don't like dark beers, and I'm like, have you tried a porter? Because it's not super roasty, and I'm like, you drink coffee, and they're like, I do, every day, every morning, and I said you should try a porter, see if you like it, and if you don't, they're usually not, you know, crazy expensive, they're just kind of a basic beer, but it's one of those, okay, now I'm drinking a roasty beer, not so much caramelized or heavily hopped, pale, it is a roasty, slow sipper, but you can drink them very much so with meals, it's kind of like an old school beer, and definitely perfect for the upcoming colder weather.
So I beat that up, we've got quite a bit of information about the porter, you know, we talked about the imperial stuff, the only thing that we didn't really talk about, and I'm not going into the newer stuff, like super hazy IPAs, and you can listen to IPAs for days, the other American beers that are kind of purely American are like the heavily fruited sours, which we tried and talked about in Sour Powers, go check that episode out, the only other kind of American beer culture is the American barley wine, I think we talked about it a little bit when we were talking about double IPAs and the IPAs for days, but you've got barley wine, wheat wine, those type of beers in the American culture. Also known as truth agent. Yeah, a few of those and you could get any secret out of me.
But I think of American barley wine as taking, you know, English barley wines are very caramel, high ABV, just a lot of flavor, but America is let's hop the heck out of it, let's get it pretty bitter to balance with that high gravity, meaning, you know, it's a sweeter beer, but we have to add more hops to it. It's kind of like a double IPA without any of the juiciness, it's more malt forward, but at the double IPA kind of ABV, and that is, that's kind of like to me the other spectrum, you know, you start with lager, you end with barley wine, and you know, barley wine and imperial stouts are kind of on the same platform, it's just one's roasty and one's not so roasty. So imperial stouts are going to be a dark roasted malt where the American barley wine is going to be more of a pale malt, and it's definitely going to be, you know, on the light brown to brown side, but it's not going to have those roast-like notes.
Now that we've gone through basically the entire gamut of American beers, cheers, cheers to
them, let's talk a little bit about Edmunds Oast. So I've actually been, I think there's still three, there might be more, there might be less, iterations of their brewery. I had traveled to South Carolina right before the pandemic, and I really wanted to check it out.
They actually started as kind of, I think, a bottle shop, wine store, did a lot of wine tastings, but beer was getting big and they kind of converted that into a brewery and they were brewing beer. That was like the original Edmunds Oast brewing. But then they kind of stopped brewing there as they got bigger, and now it's still just they're like bottle shop, really good tap list, you know, very, very similar kind of vibe as Magic Bear, but just think of the wine program being much more elevated there and a lot more involved.
Then they opened like a brewery with a really nice restaurant attached. It definitely had, you know, service-minded, it wasn't your order food and here comes the number and you hold it at your table and they just run it out to you. This was full service, really high end Edmunds Oast.
So we went to that because I wanted to get dinner and really liked the beer I had at the first spot and the original spot. And then there's not a ton going on in South Carolina. So we had gone to Westbrook's, a big one, so I made sure to check out Westbrook.
I think there was a couple other ones that were just, you know, they're there, but nothing that like I had known about prior to. But you know, I kind of fell in love and really realized that this Edmunds Oast was doing something special and they had opened up a third iteration, which was kind of like, hey, now we're doing production brewery, we're brewing a lot, we're distributing, I mean, I'm getting it here. So obviously they've got, you know, beer traveling around the country, but it was very similar to, you know, some of the breweries here where they just kind of take over an old industrial space or a large area and they kind of convert it and it was good food, but more like pub grub and that's what pub grub is like.
I think there's a lot of tacos and french fry flights, a lot of just brewery grub now. The pub grub is more, you know, burgers and fish and chips and, you know, certain like just like Dagwood style sandwiches. Yeah, it can get complex.
And this one was the, all right, here's your pager, we'll page you when your food's ready. And it was nice, we enjoyed it, but you know, that second iteration, like full service, really nice restaurant was very good. So when I saw that I can get Edmund's Oast, I jumped on it.
And this is just, they do a lot of classic beers. I mean, they'll make some sours, but it's like a cranberry sour, very simple and very easy. And then you have, you know, like really good American IPAs that are a little bit hazy, but nothing crazy, you know, over the top.
And then, you know, here they just have an American style porter. So we are going to pour some beers. I think we're going
to snap a couple pictures, but then we'll come back.
We're going to talk about what it looks like, what it smells like, what it tastes like. And then we'll, we'll try to wrap this up so that we're not doing this for IPAs for days. Right.
And we're back here at Magic Bear 799 Seneca Street in Buffalo, Larkinville. Yes, we, we poured our beer, we had, I mean, cheers to American beers. So we had to get our cheers in and then now we're, we're doing our S's, our sights, our smells, our swirls, our sips, and you know, we're going to enjoy this beer.
So, you know, first thing you got to enjoy it with your eyes. So I always, you know, if you, if you've come to learn, if you've been following along with all of our episodes, first and foremost, thank you that you've made it this long. We're what, 34 episodes now? Yeah.
But I'm looking at this opaque. We've hit opaque. It is, it's no longer brown.
It's black. I mean, it's got a undertone of brown. And when I look at my beer, I do before I lift it to the light.
So I'm kind of looking at it straight on. I prematurely lifted it. No, I saw it, you know, I set you up because I always look at the lights.
You're like, oh, Craig's doing the light thing now. So when you look at it, I'm like, oh, I could see a little bit of brown in the head, has a little bit of a tan or beige note to it. And that's all, you know, indicative of a porter as well as, you know, when you're adding these darker malts to it.
So now I'm raising it to the light. And that's where you start to see that, okay, this does have some brown, but I mean, it's still kind of like a coffee color. It's not this jet black, but you know, when you look at it from the side, it's definitely blacker than when you look at it, you know, kind of at a 45 degree angle to the light.
Right. You know, so that's our site. A couple of sniffs.
I mean, kind of smells like a cold brew coffee. Not like fresh brewed where, you know, sometimes even, you know, you buy that fresh bag of coffee beans and I bring it to the house. That's all you can smell for a second.
It's great. It's kind of just, you know, it gets rid of any of those funky smells and you just got that coffee. I think sometimes you use coffee to help with your aroma.
It kind of just resets the nasal. I have a container of, it's going to sound weird because I don't even think they make it anymore. I have a container of Folgers Noir coffee in my freezer that I, if I need to, I just, it's also a good COVID tester too.
Oh yeah. It's like, can I still, oh yeah, it still smells robust. So yeah, speaking of robust, this is an American Porter would be robust Porter versus the English Porter would be a little, you know, lighter.
And we'll talk about that more when we taste it. So those are all the tastes, flavors. So obviously when we talk about the Amber and what we thought it would taste like and more caramel, I look at this and I'm like, okay, I think it's going to be roasty.
I mean, I don't know how roasty, cause you know, you always forget about the Porter. I feel, you know, a lot of people just look at this and like, Oh, that's a stout. And it's like, it might be, but don't forget about that little guy, the Porter.
You know, I would know that this isn't a brown ale. I mean, at least I would hope so. And then, you know, especially it has a little undertone where, you know, it lightens up.
So, you know, I would say it's either Porter or stout, but then when we sip it. And just so for you listening, we pre-cheers during the break. Yes.
Yes. During our, you'll, you can photo, check our photo for evidence. So, you know, when I drink this, I would go, okay.
I mean, it's, it's, it tastes like coffee and roasted malt, like I thought it would. But then it's not super roasty. I mean, it's not bitter roasty.
No, it's got a little sweetness on the back end, which I really enjoy. And that's one of the things I like about Porters. And you get a little bit more with the Brown Porter from England, almost like a fruitiness, kind of like how we got that, I was talking about like a little bit of raisin note.
Yes. You know, same thing here. Sometimes it can come off a little, you know, it's a little darker now, so maybe a little bit more figgy.
And it's got that, you know, and again, I think, I don't know the science of all of it. You know, I know a lot of big words, but to me, the sweetness that we're getting now, when you put that in the same context and environment of a darker roasted malt, so now you got a different pH going on, and a lot of different factors. When that mixes, I think, you know, I said before, it kind of came off as like this, you know, rum raisin.
And now to me, it comes off as like almost like a slight fruitiness, like slight berry and like almost fig, fig light with that like with that dark color. But really, it just, it tastes like a nice, easy drinking coffee. You know, not really a cream in there.
And it's not, it's not like that really dark, acrid black coffee. And it's not harshly bitter at all. Slight bitterness, caramel on the back end.
So just just nicely sweet. Yeah, and I'm glad you bring that up. Because it does have like a lingering like sense of sweetness that comes across as like, you know, coffee, chocolate.
And like I was saying, when I went through the whole, you know, pecking order of the darker brown to black beers, this sits where I'd like it to sit. So this is a very, you know, in my opinion, very good interpretation. I think I had it maybe once other.
But that's one thing about a brewery when I learned to trust a brewery, like any style that they come out with, I'm willing to take a shot on it. Some are better than others. But you know, this guy here, it is exactly what I look for an American porter.
Definitely roast up front, a little lingering, you know, chocolate that definitely turned into some caramel. And just that like slight, slight bit of like fruity sweetness,
enough where you know, you're drinking a, you know, it is a robust beer, you know, we, we started with a creme ale, we had a very refreshing wheat, and then we had a nice caramel and started dipping into the bitterness with that amber. And now here we are at a, you know, porters aren't going to have a ton of hot bitterness, just enough to balance that sweetness, because they also have this this roast bitterness to them.
Right. And if you've ever had a Baltic Porter, Baltic Porter is even a little bit more robust. They ended up getting like a black licorice, you know, not not super anise, but little like black licorice, chicory, kind of, you know, almost like spice kind of, yeah, there's no note to them.
Yeah. With being very roasty, and then they're usually kind of smooth, a lot of them using a lager yeast. So that's kind of a, you know, a lot of the Porter styles and the Porter is one of those ones where, you know, kind of like how that American wheat was an easy base to add some fruit to it, American Porter is an easy base to add some flavors that go well with coffee, right.
So think of the all the different shots you can get at a coffee shop, okay, let me get a shot of caramel, let me get a shot of vanilla, like whatever you want, like you can have your pumpkin spice Porter, if you wanted to have it, you can have, you know, you see a lot of vanilla porters, because vanilla goes real well with the chocolate notes and the caramel. But then there's, you know, Young Lion makes a delicious salted caramel Porter. I've seen, you know, we have a red velvet Porter here from Ithaca.
Fun. Yeah, just all sorts of different things, but a lot of a lot of chocolate, vanilla, caramel, those type of stuff that, you know, just lend themselves nicely to the roast of the Porter. Same thing you would see in a stout.
It's just not as roasty or as bitter as a stout would be. And then a lot of times with those stouts, that's where you start seeing the pastry stouts. Because if you got something that's got bold, intense roast flavors, it can kind of hold up to, hey, I'm going to add a bunch of sweet additional items here to make a fun snicker doodle stout that is going to knock you on your butt, as well as you know, provide you with a ton of flavor.
A lot of those are slow sippers. This guy right here is, you know, this isn't a gulper. This Porter is not going to be something that I'm, you know, drinking in a beer garden.
No, I could see this as the evening, you know, especially wintertime, it's cooling down. You know, it's kind of like how you drink your coffee in the morning. I could see this being a good tailgate beer.
So I'll tell a funny story because to me, there's a good comparison beer here. For me is Edmund Fitzgerald from Great Lakes. Oh, yeah.
Very good quintessential. Yeah. Yeah.
So where we have our nerdy little pinball league at Pocketeer, they have Edmund Fitzgerald. It's actually considered on the number one tap on their beer list.
And we have a guy on our team, without fail, every, like once a month, he will buy a pitcher of Edmund Fitzgerald and put it on the table.
And I think I'm the only, I shouldn't say, maybe there's another guy on the team who will enjoy some of it, but usually it's all on him. And we're talking a pitcher of Porter. So hats off to him.
You know, me, if I'm drinking a Porter, unless I'm tasting a whole bunch of Porters and doing tasters, I'm not going to go beyond like one, you know, 16 ounce can. So I give him all the kudos in the world for doing something like that. I mean, he must really like Porters.
I like Porters, but apparently not as much as he does. Well, you know, when the time calls for it. Right.
So yeah, it's like, I feel like it's like game on when he, pitcher of Edmund Fitzgerald, boom, on the table. You know what time of night it's going to be? The pitcher comes, and maybe that's the reason he does it. You know, he's like, all right, I got Jason here.
I know he's going to at least have one, but I put this pitcher down and it's like, all right, if he's going to have one, I'm okay with drinking the other five that come in this pitcher. And you know, next thing you know, I mean, uh, again, they're not typically elevated ABV. I mean, this one is slightly at 6.5, but you know, a lot of them are in that five to six range.
I would say six is more commonplace, okay. But it's not meant to like put you on your, on your rear. It's, it's more, Hey, here's a full flavored beer.
And then, you know, that's what we did with the cheers to American was try American interpretations, uh, you know, kind of like you would, uh, throughout dinner, starting light and going to dark. And it also kind of like, you know, it's reminiscent of like the evening, you know, it might be his, uh, symbolic way of saying like the night is young. Like we have this picture, a picture of Porter.
It's dark, like the night we've got to start on it. And you know, that's the one tough thing. Like people always ask me like, Oh, do you have a favorite beer? And it's like, there's different beers for, I mean, not only different seasons, but different times of the day.
And I'm, I'm a little less season as I am time of Okay. Like later, it's going to answer a question for me that I have at the end, like later at night I want, you know, like that nightcap kind of like you have espresso after dessert and stuff. And I like the darker beers at night.
And then, you know, during the day, like in the morning, that's where, you know, I could do this again because I like a darker kind of like, you know, coffee, like beverage in the morning, but you know, in the afternoon and when the sun's out, like I'm not, you know, no one's like, Oh, you know, Porter 180 degree, you know, 100, 100 degrees out there. Right. You're putting down porters and American stouts snuggling up with a, yeah, with a stout.
That's where I want those, you know, the, the loggers and the cream ales and
the wheat beer. I want something that's a little bit more refreshing. Yeah.
But then, you know, come wintertime, it's like, all right, because it's not like this is warming, the alcohol would warm you up. You know, I just think it does go well with, you know, people just, they think the dark beers are roasty. So it's kind of like, you know, around the campfire around the fireplace, because it's cold out.
And yeah, you know, it just gives you that just, you know, I'm in a winter wonderland, the white snow outside, you know, clashes with the black glass of beer in my hand. And I think we have a responsibility as ambassadors to craft beer to be able to debunk the myths that, that, that are out there. Yeah.
It's people that say that I'm like, okay, so that means you're not going to drink red wine in the summer. You're, you're only going to drink white wine and you don't want white wine when you're eating some foods in winter. And you're not going to drink rosé all day, every day.
You probably don't wear white after Labor Day. You know, it's to me, there's, there's a time and it doesn't necessarily, you know, but obviously, you know, fall into winter lends itself to darker, roastier and some of the maltier beers. Yeah.
And, you know, this is, this is a good one. It's kind of like, you know, it's like we're at the end of our dinner, end of our little cheers to American beers. And, you know, I think we touched base on probably at least 15 styles I've talked about within the American catalog.
And again, all takes on, you know, other than that cream ale, you know, cream ale is kind of a take on a quick made lager. So it kind of stems back to something, but you know, it's, it's more of American innovation or an American, you know, made beer porter. I mean, obviously there's the English porter well before the American porter, but we've made it to our liking.
And now you've got the robust American porter and makes its own rules. Yeah. And then the Baltic porter is another, and there's places that have Imperial porter and it could be argued, how is there an Imperial porter? Wouldn't that just make it a stout and, you know, all sorts of fun stuff when it comes with, you know, like I said, most times it's, it's a good marketing ploy.
But what you really want is your consumer to know what it is you're trying to offer them. So an Imperial porter would mean like, Hey, it's porter with more ABV. And I think I mentioned earlier, you know, the difference between porter and stout is usually roasted barley.
So maybe they, you know, anyone that does an Imperial porter, it's higher ABV, dark beer, but they didn't add that roasted barley to it. So it doesn't have that real acrid kind of dark roast flavor. It's still got this lighter, you know, kind of cold pressed, cold brew kind of coffee vibe to it.
And, you know, this is one of those ones that if you don't like dark beers, next time you see a porter on the, you know, don't immediately run out and grab a six pack, but if you're doing a build a pack or you, you know, come to Magic Bear and you're grabbing, you know, single one in there, throw one in there, see how it goes. See if you like it. And just know that English porter and American porter is going to be slightly different.
And I would say, try just an actual porter first to see what you think. And that'll get you into dark beers. But if not, and you want a little sweetness, a little flavor, like I said, there's plenty of flavored porters out there.
And then there's the whole smoked porter and you name it. Yeah, I've done that. And I've had my share of smoked porters too, that I could take or leave, honestly.
It's a, it's a, it's a complexity that I can't, I haven't been able to battle through yet. So yeah, it's one of those, like there really needs to be the right place and time and they're good.